Forget Winning the Hunger Games — One of the Best YA Series Is a Story of Failure

The Tripod Trilogy/The Hildebrand Brothers

One of the great pleasures of young adult literature is that you get to imagine yourself as the most important person in the world. Harry Potter thinks he’s a despised orphan, only to learn he’s the only hope of an entire realm of magic and wonder. From even before his birth, Ender from Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is engineered to save earth from alien invasion. After she volunteers as tribute in The Hunger Games, Katniss Everdeen quickly becomes the key symbol of her world’s resistance movement against totalitarian oppression. In each of these cases, their powers and abilities — magic, intelligence, strength — are important, but even more important is how much each of them personally matters. Harry and Ender and Katniss aren’t just the stars of a book or a series; they’re the stars of everything. Their particular story is the story of history, and their world revolves around them.

The formula is simple, satisfying, and omnipresent — or almost omnipresent. John Christopher’s Tripods Trilogy, which concluded 45 years ago in 1968, is one of the few YA series that refuses to play the game, which is probably why it’s drifted in semi-obscurity. The series features a young English boy, Will, who works to save humanity from its enslavement by inhuman overlords. The alien tripods came to earth some hundred years before Will was born, and used their knowledge of mind control to conquer the earth. Now, in Will’s time, the population lives in medieval style villages, peaceful and subservient. All children are fitted with mind-control caps when they are 13, turning them into willing slaves. Will is contacted by a resistance movement shortly before his capping, and the three novels (The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire) detail his efforts to fight the Tripods and restore Earth to humanity.

So far, this sounds like any other YA series. There’s an overwhelmingly powerful enemy; there’s a youthful protagonist; the two shall fight and the improbable but inevitable victory of David over Goliath shall ensue.

The difference here, though, is that Will isn’t David. At best, he’s the guy standing over near David, maybe holding the sling when the hero gets tired. In the first book, for example, Will has no destiny. He’s not sought out by the resistance; when they go looking for any pre-capped, dissatisfied kids they can find, Will just happens to be one of them. He’s no more important than his cousin Henry, a smug, unpleasant bully, whom we first see shoving Will’s head in the mud.

In Harry Potter terms, Henry would be the Malfoy character, the thuggish, nasty antagonist. Not in the Tripods Trilogy, though. Instead, as you read through the books, it becomes clear that, if anyone is Malfoy-like, it’s Will. The narrator, our hero, has a nasty temper. He’s often self-pitying or simply weak. In The White Mountain, he falls in love with a capped princess, and decides to give up his free will and allow himself to be capped so he can spend his life with her in luxury. Only chance makes him change his mind. In The City of Gold and Lead he is one of two boys who manage to infiltrate a Tripod city, where his laziness, impatience, and foolishness almost torpedo the mission. In fact, it’s not Will, but Henry, the “bad guy” cousin, who turns out to be the real hero — daring, noble, courageous, visionary, and eventually the hope of the world.

Of course, characters like Harry Potter or Ender have weaknesses and doubts and failures too. But they’re always surmounted, or in the case of heroes like Ender and Katniss, treated as signs of their greater tragic awesomeness — a way to make pity, like everything else, revolve around them. Will’s weaknesses, on the other hand, aren’t tragic flaws. They’re real, petty failures and though he tries and tries, he never overcomes them. Towards the end of the last book, The Pool of Fire, he gets into a stupid fist-fight with a comrade over nothing, jeopardizing his place in a crucial mission. His good friend Fritz, who is in command, has to decide whether to keep him on or not. While he does, it’s insistently clear why Fritz is in charge and Will is not. Fritz is steady and reliable; Will’s an untrustworthy ass.

None of this makes Will unlikable. On the contrary, his weaknesses make him both individual and relatable. Will demonstrates exactly how hard it is to be a hero. In The City of Gold and Lead, Will works undercover as a servant of an alien Master in the Tripods’ sweltering city of heavy gravity. Christopher’s description of the gothic oppression — the weight, the exhaustion, and the Tripods’ uncaring, brutal imperialism — is riveting, and easily the highlight of the series. Confronted with horror and deprivation, Will struggles to gather useful information — and screws up so badly that his much more capable companion (Fritz again) can’t escape the city with him when they finally find a way out.

Though Will gets much vital information back to the resistance, the leader of the movement, Julius, tells him that his adventures are “a story of failure.” Our protagonist did his best, and it wasn’t good enough. As Will says, with useless but understandable self-reproach, “Fritz did more. And Fritz did not come back.”

YA literature is often appealing because it’s nice to imagine that you matter more than everyone else. By the same token, to only read stories about the person at the center of the universe, to always insist that only that person deserves a story, can get monotonous. If I ever had to be a hero, I’m pretty sure I’d be more like Will than like Harry or Ender or Katniss — which is to say, I’d be clumsy, impatient, selfish, whiny, and generally bad at it. More like Will, who screws up and regrets it but never actually changes; Will who has no destiny, but does what he can to help out the people who do. It’s a milder, less certain heroism, but one that has its own sort of resonance: a story not about the most important person in the world, but about the rest of us.